"Not believing in God is no excuse for being virulently anti-religious or naïvely pro-science," says Dylan Evans, a professor of robotics at the University of West England in Bristol.

Evans has written an article for the Guardian of London deriding the old-fashioned, "19th-century" atheism of such prominent thinkers as Richard Dawkins and Jonathan Miller, instead proposing a new, modern atheism which "values religion, treats science as simply a means to an end and finds the meaning of life in art."

Indeed, he says, religion itself is to be understood as "a kind of art, which only a child could mistake for reality and which only a child would reject for being false."

Evans' position fits well with that of the American philosopher of science Michael Ruse, whose new book, The Evolution-Creation Struggle, lays much of the blame for the growth of creationism in America — and for the increasingly strident attempts by the religious right to have evolutionary theory kicked off the curriculum and replaced by the new dogma of "intelligent design" — at the door of the scientists who have tried to compete with, and even supplant, religion.( Read more... )

This Time magazine article delivers an inside look at the sociopolitical situation in today's Iran. The author describes how the theocrats in power have bribed the nation's restless young people into "grudging acquiescence" -- at least for now.

Anyway, I was particularly struck by this quote:

"You have a situation," says my friend Karim Sadjadpour, an analyst in Tehran for the International Crisis Group, "where the majority of Iranians have neither the luxury to risk their livelihoods waging political protest nor the nothing-to-lose desperation and rage that result from penury."